English essay lengths

Denter

I was just wondering how much everyone is writing? like how many pages for the composition on paper 1, the single text, comparitive text, and prescribed poetry... I know everyone has different sized writng and all, but a rough idea would be helpful....

zam

Good question! I'm not really sure, but I usually do around:

Essay: 4 pages
Single Text: 3 pages
Comparative: 3.5 pages
Poetry: 3 pages

kev9100

zam wrote: »

Good question! I'm not really sure, but I usually do around:

Essay: 4 pages
Single Text: 3 pages
Comparative: 3.5 pages
Poetry: 3 pages

You only do 3 pages for peotry? Did your teacher say that's ok?

keenan110

Poetry: 4 pages
Comparative: 5-6 pages
Single text: 4 pages
Essay: 4-5 pages

zam

kev9100 wrote: »

You only do 3 pages for peotry? Did your teacher say that's ok?

Well think about it like this - the Section B on the Paper 1 comprehension is worth the same amount of marks as the Poetry. I wouldn't waste my time writing 3 pages for that! 900-1000 words is standard for poetry I hear

validusername

Essay: 4-5 pages
Comparative: 5-7 pages
(I know I write way too much for this and I do try and shorten it down a bit but I find it almost impossible to cover all the points with just 5 pages!)
Single Text: 4-5 pages
Poetry: 4 pages

anothernight

I do about 1000 words for poetry and long questions. About 500 for the part B's.

All between 4-6 pages...I have gigantic handwriting though.

johnmcdnl

3-4 for everything is pretty much standard...

but QUALITY is so much better than quantity..

implausible

There's no right or wrong length of answer; there's only answering the question and not answering the question:cool:

Students get very worked up about the poetry. It's 1/8 of the exam and you should try not to spend 1/2 of your time studying it or 1/2 the exam writing it. 3/4 pages of standard writing is absolutely fine.

A long comparative is ok, as long as it's very clearly structured and addresses the question asked. There is no need to cover EVERYTHING, you could write forever on cultural context for example and never finish it. Write about the aspects that show the most about the CC.

Behind you Joey

Essay - 6
Single Text - 4
Comparative - 6
Poetry - 4

seriousfizz

I usually dish out 3-4 pages each on the big shtuff. Gets me what I need

gant0

I aim for 3-4 pages on each long question.In the mocks I only did 3 pages for each long question.Gonna need to bump that up a little if I want my B.

Nihilist21

It's awfully clichéd but it really is a case of quality > quantity. I wouldn't worry much about the length of your work if it covers the question asked in a well-structured and concise manner which accurately conveys the depth of your knowledge of the material. And yes, this applies to paper 1 too. For the composition they're assessing one's ability to formulate a logically binding narrative/argument that doesn't waffle and shows that you fully understand what the question is asking you to do.

Crow92

It also really depends on your writing size, one teacher told me over the easter the average studentw writes about 7-8 words per line, whilst i write about 13-16 per line...so....

The essay during the mox was a speech and it was only 1.5 A4 pages long, got 79/100

OxfordComma

At the risk of sounding like a parrot, quality really is an awful lot more important than quantity, but obviously you can't get away with giving answers that are too short, either.

I wrote about the following for the various questions in my exam, if I remember correctly (bear in mind that my writing is VERY big, especially when I'm under pressure):

Essay: 5-6 pages
Single Text: 6 pages
Comparative: 7 pages
Poetry: 5 pages

As I've said already, my writing is big by normal standards. Hope that's in some way helpful.

Denter

Thanks all

_Chaos

I always do 3-4 pages, but normally hit the 5....as long as you cover all the points (eg theme tone imagery & poetic device for each poem, and relate to q at start and end of ewach paragraph, with varieb vocab) you should be alright!

Finical

Essay: 6 pages
Poetry: 4 pages
Comparative: 6 pages
Single text: 5 pages